Hamza Alavi: interpreting Pakistan, changing the world  II

I flew to Karachi in July/August to see him at his elegant Gandhi Gardens residence, clad in his immaculate white kurta pajama (national dress). What followed were a couple of hours on a sophisticated exposition on the class structure of Pakistan and suggestions for future research. Back in Leeds, I added to my grateful instructors’ knowledge of Hamza Alavi by informing them that Hamza was in fact still alive, and not deceased, as they had been presuming all along!

I moved on from Alavi’s analysis of the role of the mediating classes in his seminal 1972 article ‘The State in Postcolonial Societies’ (published in New Left Review) to my unpublished thesis titled ‘Neither Tragedy Nor Farce: The Contradictions of Bourgeois Democracy in Pakistan’, which extends Alavi’s analysis by attempting to explain why democracy — and more specifically bourgeois democracy — has historically never flourished in Pakistan. The research has concluded that the primary reason why bourgeois democracy has failed to strengthen itself in Pakistan is because the state had a very weak industrial bourgeoisie to begin with at the time of its inception in 1947, which was why they were neutralised by powerful unelected institutions like the army, the landed elite and the civil-military bureaucracy. That is why Pakistan today appears close to 18th century France as described by Karl Marx in his 18th Brumaire. I am now anxious to publish this as a book.

Over the years, I have frequently thought about my lone encounter with Hamza Alavi back in 2002, just a year before he passed away, and have come to cherish its memories deeply. This has allowed me to think more thoroughly about the relevance of his work, especially on post-colonial societies. As I have tried to show, humbly, in my own work, the Bonapartist role did not remain confined to Bhutto — the baton was passed to Musharraf who played the role more successfully than the former. One also needs to take into account the awakenings of Pakistan’s middle-class and the fact that the bourgeoisie are still weak in the country, unlike in neighbouring India, thus perpetuating the need for mediation. Also, Pakistan is a far more urbanised society than it was in Hamza’s time as the work of Reza Ali has shown. Therefore, the debate over whether feudalism is still the dominant mode of production in Pakistan needs to be re-approached, as well as the fact that the military may have taken a back seat for now. However, it is simultaneously the biggest landlord and capitalist in the country, albeit challenged by powerful social movements in Punjab and Sindh. I also think Hamza’s work on postcolonial societies could be useful for understanding some Arab societies in transition after the fall of dictatorships there, especially in ‘advanced’ peripheral capitalist societies like Egypt, where a similar coterie of the army and civil-military bureaucracy, midwifed by the US albeit without the control of landlords (due to the land reforms of Nasser), has hampered Pakistan’s socio-economic development.

Hamza Alavi was truly an intellectual giant of Pakistan. That he was never awarded any indigenous medal or recognition for his tremendous scholarship probably adds to his reputation. It in fact reflects the plight of those in Pakistan, for whose cause Hamza Alavi fought throughout his life: they are still impoverished and hopeless in modern Pakistan. They are what Karl Marx would call the ‘have nots’.

Interestingly, in early October, when the legacy of the late Ralph Miliband, one of Hamza’s great comrades in the UK and an important Marxist theorist and critic of capitalism, came under attack by a pro-capitalist paper, The Daily Mail, Miliband’s younger son Edward, one of the leading lights of the British Labour Party, gave a spirited response defending his father. The affair was entertaining not because the Labour Party, especially under the Miliband brothers, had long ceased to be the socialist party of the oppressed that Miliband senior’s politics had always hoped it to be, but that it led to a great spike of interest in Miliband senior’s classic books on parliamentary socialism and the capitalist state. I wonder though that when Hamza did not have any biological progeny of his own, how can interest in his own distinguished work be resuscitated here in Pakistan just a decade after his death, compared to the Miliband affair within 20 years of Ralph Miliband’s death?

(Concluded)

Raza Naeem is a social scientist, literary critic, translator and longtime political activist of the Communist Mazdoor Kissan Party (CMKP), engaged as a research fellow in the Graduate Institute of Development Studies at the Lahore School of Economics in Lahore. He can be reached at razanaeem@hotmail.com